The Big DevOps Question: How Do We Get Started?

Every conversation I have with clients regarding DevOps eventually reaches a point where the client wants to know my recommendations for getting started with a DevOps program. Some have already embarked on a DevOps program, but want me to critique their approach against what I see others doing. Others simply don’t have a clue how to make the necessary changes in their organization.

Ultimately, I sense in all these conversations a lack of confidence that their intended outcome is achievable and that they’re on the right path.

The first questions I ask clients are, “What are you looking to accomplish, and what are your business drivers?” Interestingly, 90 percent of the time clients are unclear why they want to embark on this journey. Sure, DevOps makes sense academically, but if you don’t have a clear understanding of your expectations for improvement most likely you’ll end up with more questions.

Sometimes it helps if I give prompts:

Are you looking to improve quality in your production releases?

Do you need to release updates and patches into production more quickly?

What metrics are you currently looking at, and what makes you believe these are not optimal for your business?

This last question is really important. Quite often data represents invalid perspectives. Other industries’ and services’ metric of how often they deploy to production or how long it takes execute a release cycle might not be right for your business or industry. I hope medical device and airplane equipment manufacturers take a lot longer to bring something to production and test it more robustly than Netflix does its website.

In an earlier post I wrote that the need for DevOps is effectively the admittance of a problem; to wit, the cure is continuous delivery. Hence, I often tell clients that a very realistic place to start is not with the actual work, but with the communications methods and pathways that will affect implementing continuous delivery within the organization.

So many clients want to start their DevOps journey in application development and talk about what they’ve done with continuous build. That’s fantastic, but it has more to do with Agile software development than it does DevOps. If all that work creates bottlenecks in testing, you’ve accomplished very little. Now you must fix the flow to balance out development and testing. Trying to achieve continuous development through serial analysis and correction will take a long time and show little progress along the way—and often leads to abandonment.

However, if all the leaders of all the various areas involved in the continuous delivery cycle discuss how their efforts are impacted by what the other leaders’ groups do, everyone can see the bottlenecks and constraints and they can prioritize changes. Management often fosters much of the cultural impairment, as these changes can impact everything from workload to bonuses. Getting everyone involved in working together to eliminate the bottlenecks often buys credibility for the program and minimizes some of the individual adoption issues.

Don’t jump into the deep end of the DevOps pool just because everyone else is. Before embarking on your DevOps journey, do a deep analysis of your organization’s goals and baseline your current levels of performance. Discuss what needs to change based on real business goals and drivers (e.g., it takes us too long to issue regulatory changes to the system). Identify bottlenecks and constraints that exist in the current environment today and put together a plan to eliminate as many as possible.

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